News

The work of collaboration with EPFL published in Nature

2019-08-23

A tiny stretchable pump driven by electricity has been developed by an international collaborative research group of Prof. Dr. V. Cacucciolo and Prof. H. Shea of EPFL-LMTS (Soft Transducers Lab, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), Dr. J. Shintake and Prof. D. Floreano of EPFL-LIS (Laboratory of Intelligent Systems) and the area members of Prof. S. Maeda (Group A03) of Shibaura Institute of Technology and Prof. J. Shintake (Group B01) of University of Electro-Communications. The researchers’ work has just appeared in the electronic version of Nature on 14th August.

This pump is flexible, lightweight (only one gram), and silent, which is an innovative technology that could replace the rigid, noisy and bulky pumps currently used. The technology is expected to play a big role to realize autonomous soft robots, lightweight powered exoskeletons, and smart clothing.

For further continuous research development, Prof. H. Nabae (Group A02) of Tokyo Institute of Technology has just started a collaborative research with Prof. Shea’s group of EPFL on 18th August under the support for junior researchers of the research area.